Proceedings of the international symposium on databases in parallel and distributed systems

This symposium has been organized to focus attention of database professionals on extending the distributed database technology into two major related directions: databases for parallel machines and heterogeneous distributed databases. The results of research in homogeneous distributed databases need to be adapted to augment solutions to new research issues these two areas introduce. There have been significant recent advances in parallel computing, as evidenced in the introduction of a number of commercially available general-purpose parallel computers. Although these machines have the potential for substantial performance improvement in executing database operations relative to the conventional uniprocessor mainframes, there are a number of major difficulties which inhibit this potential. The usefulness of a parallel machine depends on the amount of parallelism inherent in a problem and how well the architecture of the machine can accommodate this parallelism. Some serial algorithms do not have suitable parallel analogs because of inherent causality constraints Further, some parallel machine architectures are better suited than others for implementing certain parallel algorithms.